The invention relates to an apparatus for automatic diagnosis of cells which employs the technique of microscope spectrophotometry to examine cells for automatically determining whether the cells are affected by cancer or not.
It is possible to determine whether a substance to be examined is of an anionoid or cationoid nature from the amount of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) and the diameter of a cell nucleus. A scanning integration technique may be employed to obtain the amount of DNA in the cell nucleus by the microscope spectrophotometry. To accomplish this, a spot of monochromatic light is used to scan the cell nucleus in order to determine the concentration pattern of each section traversed. The amount of DNA in the cell nucleus is obtained by summing together the integral of the concentration of each section. Also, the length from the rising to the falling end of the concentration pattern of each section is determined, and the diameter of the nucleus can be determined by choosing the maximum one of these diameters. When this method of determining the cells is utilized in an apparatus for automatic diagnosis of cells which is used to process a multitude of specimens to be examined, a high speed detection, scanning and determination of the cells becomes necessary because of the necessity to accommodate the large number of specimens to be treated efficiently. However, the full extent of the applied area must be scanned, and the measured values of the respective sections of each individual cell nucleus must be related to a corresponding cell nucleus in order to determine the amount of DNA in each cell nucleus. This leads to a complicated arrangement for the resulting processing apparatus, and unless an expensive arrangement is provided, the speed of processing will be reduced.